1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically, to techniques for implementing device-initiated and network-initiated Quality of Service (QoS) in a wireless communication network.
2. Background
Traditionally Quality of Service (QoS) is requested by a device requiring special treatment for the traffic it sends or receives. Recently, most predominant wireless standards (3GPP (UMTS Rel 8, LTE etc.), 3GPP2 (eHRPD), IEEE (WiMax) etc.) have added the capability of network initiated QoS where QoS is automatically provisioned by the network for a device based on services that device is expected to provide to its users. Network monitors the signaling messages and other user traffic sent/received by the device and automatically configures/modifies QoS for the device. In the long term, such automatic scheme is intended to have better control for network operators to manage precious network resources. In the short term, it poses several issues and challenges related to migration wherein a population of user equipment includes devices provisioned for the innovation and those that are not.
For example, it is desirable that redundant resources are addressed, avoiding resource over allocation during presence of both device and network initiated QoS. If a device requests the QoS for the same service for which it has already been provisioned by the network, there will be double resource allocation in the network than necessary.
For another example, it is desirable that degraded performance be prevented. Most legacy QoS applications are written assuming UE initiated QoS. These applications running specific behavior from the network for various QoS operations. For example, if a QoS request is denied, the application may fail to continue and throw an error to the user resulting in service availability. Alternatively, an application may decide to continue assuming best effort service but may degrade the quality to adjust to having no specific resource guarantee even though resources are reserved for this application.
For an additional example, it is desirable that roaming be addressed. Applications written to take advantage of new capability of network initiated QoS may not function well when they roam to the networks where such capability is not available.